HP's Digital Entertainment Center series has been a familiar sight around the PC Magazine Labs since 2001. The latest iteration, the HP Digital Entertainment Center z565 ($2,999 direct) is a good, steady evolution of the product. It shares the black case of recent versions, as well as its A/V-style look. The z565 is perfect for the TV "completist"the obsessive who wants to record and archive every episode of the shows he watches. A secondary group of photo and video-based entertainment enthusiasts also will be interested in the z565. These people can use the z565 to share their digital life around the house using extenders such as the Microsoft Xbox 360.

The z565 comes with a dual-core, 3.4-GHz Intel Pentium D 945 processor. The D945 is now an older processor in a world full of Core 2 Duos, but it can still perform the duties of a digital entertainment system admirablyrecording TV and storing and displaying your digital photos, artwork, music, and home videos. The z565's 2GB of system memory are plenty for running Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, and its twin NTSC tuners mean you can record at least two regular cable programs at once. The ATSC/HDTV tuner can concurrently record HDTV off the airwaves, provided you have an antenna and a clear signal from the broadcast networks.

After the HD tuner, the z565's 500GB internal hard drive and cartridge-style 300GB HP Personal Media Bay drive are the stars of the show. Not only do their combined 800GB offer ample storage space, but you can also buy extra Personal Media Bay drives in 80-, 120-, and 300GB capacities, making the hard drive capacity potentially even more vast. You'll have plenty of room for your digital life, and therein lies much of the z565's appeal.

That's not to say that style doesn't count for much, since the z656 has it in spades. Its form factor is that of a quintessential living room PC. The system exemplifies what a Digital Entertainment System should look like, with a front-mounted information screen that displays details from MP3s, digital photos, and the TV guide that's built into the MCE OS. The controls for DVD playback are also mounted on the front, making the z565 feel like a piece of consumer electronics equipment. You can also control the z565 from the comfort of your couch. Its wireless keyboard, for instance, features many shortcut switches, not to mention a useful trackball for controlling the mousea welcome alternative to the barely usable pointing stick on Microsoft's wireless MCE keyboard. HP's MCE infrared remote is nicer, too; it looks more customized than the standard Microsoft IR remote you get from everyone else. Last but not least, the z565's IR receiver is built into its chassis, so you'll have one less piece of equipment cluttering things up (it does come with the usual external IR receiver in case you have to hide your z565 away).

About the only thing missing from the z565's repertoire is an HD-class optical drive. HP is a proponent of the HD DVD video format, so it's a surprise to see that glaring omission on the company's top-of-the-line, living-room-friendly media center. Still, with the format wars still raging and no combo HD DVD/Blu-ray drive in sight, it might be better to wait. My only other significant nitpick is the system's top-mounted cooling fan for the processor: In my eyes, a side or back-exhausting design would make more sense. Even with this top mounted fan, though, the system is quiet from regular viewing distances (10 feet away).

Performance-wise, the z565 improves on its predecessors, particularly in areas such as video encoding, where the dual-core Pentium D processor helps, and 3D gaming, where the addition of a beefy nVidia GeForce 7600GS graphics card is a boon. The z565 can run 3D games smoothly at HD resolutions and scored an excellent 89 frames per second at Doom 3 at a 1,024-by-768 resolution. Likewise, the z565's time of 7 minutes 56 seconds on our Windows Media Encoder test means the z565 is adequate for occasional video re-encoding dutiesthe sort of thing you might do if you wanted to load your recorded TV onto your smartphone or portable media player. Core 2-powered systems perform a bit faster at video encoding, but not by enough to make Pentium D obsolete (yet).

Compared with similar digital entertainment systems such as the Niveus Media Center Rainier Edition, the z565 is (a lot) less expensive. However, the Rainier does have a newer Core 2 Duo processor, silent cooling for the processor and graphics, and an HD DVD drive. The Sony VAIO XL2 is similarly priced, but uses an older, slower Pentium D processor. Still, the XL2 includes a 200-disc CD/DVD changer, its defining feature.

All in all, I really like what I see from the HP Digital Entertainment Center z565. Its scads of hard drive space, dual-core processing, higher-end graphics, great wireless keyboard, and, above all, a intuitive and cool design earn it our Editors' Choice nod. If you want a high-end system with an HD DVD drive today, go with the Niveus Rainier. But if you want to give the HD DVD versus Blu-ray format wars a little time to settle down and still get to unwrap a digital entertainment system during the holiday season, then the z565 is a great choice with unlimited storage (and $2G less expensive to boot!)

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